Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Integrating 3rd Party Help Into Delphi 2007

Below are the manual steps needed to integrate third party help into the Delphi 2007 help system. If these steps are not followed exactly the help my be left in a corrupted state.

1. Unregister our help with command "h2reg -u"

2. Copy your compiled help into the directory "C:\Program Files\CodeGear\RAD Studio\5.0\Help\Doc". It may be easier to remove it later if you copy it to a subdirectory.

3. Add your HelpTOCNode to "Master.HxT". If your help is only one part add these lines to the file: (obviously put your title inplace of "YourTitle")


<HelpTOCNode Title="YourTitle" Url="mshelp://borland.bds5/YourTitle/index.html">
<HelpTOCNode NodeType="TOC" Url="YourTitle" />
</HelpTOCNode>


If your table of contents is more complex follow the examples in the file.

4. In h2reg.ini, you need to add two lines for each .HxS file you have. The first is under the "[Reg_Title]" section. If you only have an .HxS file with no .HxI file add this line: (path is relative to the h2reg.exe, if your files are in the same directory you don't need the path)


borland.bds5|bds5start||YourTitle.HxS|YourTitle.HxS|


If you have an .hxi file add this line:


borland.bds5|YourTitle||YourFile.HxS|YourFile.HxI|


The second line you need to add is under the "[UnReg_Title]" section. The line is:


borland.bds5|YourTitle|


5. Register the help by running "h2reg -r"

6. View the help with: (the first time will show a status bar)


"%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Help 8\dexplore.exe" /helpcol
ms-help://borland.bds5"